Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  And so it went, at each stop on the tour. In public, the charismatic Frenchman made a great impression, charming Americans with his heavily accented (but near-fluent) English and winning smiles when he tripped over an idiom. Always he cut a striking figure, whether praying at George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, or visiting the naval and military academies as well as Fort Benning and Langley Air Force Base, or laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or attending a gala dinner in his honor hosted by Henry Luce at the Union Club in Manhattan. He won praise for his performance on NBC’s Meet the Press, before an estimated viewing audience of twelve million, and for his address before the National Press Club, where again he pressed the theme that Indochina was the key to saving Asia from the Communist peril: “The loss of Southeast Asia would mean that Communism would have at its disposal essential strategic raw materials, that the Japanese economy would forever be unbalanced, and that the whole of Asia would be threatened.” Hanoi was the key to victory, he continued, its importance comparable to Bastogne, where American armies fought off German encirclement in December 1944, and to Berlin, which the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded some four years later.47

  From Truman on down, senior U.S. officials publicly affirmed support for the war effort and pledged to speed up military deliveries. In private sessions, though, they refused to accept that Korea and Vietnam were one war, and they pressed the general for more proof that France was sincerely committed to full independence for Indochina, and for greater efforts to build up the Vietnamese fighting forces. The Washington Post spoke for much of American officialdom when it editorialized, in the middle of the French general’s visit, that “the great problem in increased military aid is to avoid the appearance of propping up colonialism.”48

  Still, when de Lattre and his wife left New York by air shortly before midnight on September 25, bound for Paris, he took satisfaction in the results of the trip. As well he might. The Americans had unambiguously affirmed the critical importance of the fight against Ho Chi Minh and had pledged to bolster their military assistance and to deliver it with more dispatch. In Congress and in the press, and among the general public, awareness of the French war and of French military needs was now much greater than before. As a laudatory New York Times editorial put it, the Washington talks made two points plain: “First, we are in basic political agreement with the French. Second, our aid to the Associated States of Indochina will be stepped up. Both are vital.”49

  VII

  EVEN BEFORE DE LATTRE’S VISIT, THE AID HAD BEEN SUBSTANTIAL. He had already received upward of a hundred U.S. fighter planes, fifty bombers and transports, and ground arms for thirty battalions, as well as artillery and naval craft. But other promised deliveries, including trucks and tanks, were months behind schedule. Only 444 of a scheduled 968 jeeps and 393 of 906 six-by-six trucks, for example, had been sent in fiscal year 1951. Lovett blamed the slow pace on production problems and a lack of expertise at some plants, but he and other officials also said the French themselves were partly responsible, chiefly because of their inadequate maintenance practices. Distribution of matériel already delivered was another problem: Armed convoys were forced to move slowly—whether by road or water—and were subject to frequent Viet Minh attacks. Nevertheless, Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins pledged to de Lattre that U.S. deliveries would be stepped up, and they were: In the four months following his visit, the French received more than 130,000 tons of equipment, including 53 million rounds of ammunition, 8,000 general-purpose vehicles, 650 combat vehicles, 200 aircraft, 14,000 automatic weapons, and 3,500 radios.50

  DE LATTRE AND A THOROUGHLY SMITTEN GENERAL LAWTON COLLINS IN HANOI ON OCTOBER 23, 1951. (photo credit 11.2)

  Collins paid glowing tribute to the success of de Lattre’s U.S. trip when he called on the general in Saigon a few weeks later. “You came like a crusader to present the cause for which you were fighting in Indo-China,” the American gushed. “You pleaded with all your incomparable ardor and conviction. Few of your campaigns have created enthusiasm that is comparable to that which you raised by your visit to America. No one has ever shown, as you showed, in such simple language, all that is at stake in Indo-China, nor made clear the issues that are possible. To our people you have rendered a great service.”51

  That was one possible view of the Frenchman’s mission and cause, but not the only one. Another American, who held a starkly different view, called on de Lattre in Saigon that autumn, a young Democratic congressman who in time would stand at the very apex of America’s Vietnam decision making. This was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose visit to Indochina in mid-October—accompanied by his brother Robert and sister Patricia, during a tour of Asia and the Middle East—is described at the start of this book. JFK was taken aback by what he saw, it will be recalled—France was engaged in a major colonial war and was plainly losing. The United States, as France’s principal ally in the effort, was guilty by association and risked being forced down the same path as the European colonialists. The French-supported Vietnamese government lacked broad popular support, Kennedy determined, and Ho Chi Minh would win any nationwide election.

  It was a remarkable message coming from a man who hitherto had sounded every bit the Cold Warrior, blasting the Truman administration, for example, for allowing China to fall to Communism and bragging to constituents about his ties to the rabidly anti-Communist Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. But it’s clear that the Asian tour changed JFK’s outlook. It convinced him that the United States must align herself with the emerging nations, and that Communism could never be defeated by relying solely or principally on force of arms. His Indochina experience led him to that conclusion, as did a dinner conversation in New Delhi with Jawaharlal Nehru, who called the French war an example of doomed colonialism and said Communism offered the masses “something to die for” whereas the West promised only the status quo. War would not stop Communism, Nehru warned him; it would only enhance it, “for the devastation of war breeds only more poverty and more want.” Kennedy agreed, but he wondered if U.S. officials grasped these essential truths. Many of “our representatives abroad seem to be a breed of their own,” he said a few weeks later, “moving mainly in their own limited circles not knowing too much of the people to whom they are accredited, unconscious of the fact that their role is not tennis and cocktails, but the interpretation to a foreign country of the meaning of American life and the interpretations to us of that country’s aspirations and aims.”52

  Other Americans also held these twin convictions—that the United States was becoming too enmeshed in the war, and that the prospects were nevertheless bleak. At the CIA and at the State Department, numerous midlevel officials held them, as did some of Kennedy’s colleagues on Capitol Hill. Indeed, a sizable number of informed Republican and Democratic lawmakers in this period saw the war as resulting primarily from France’s determination to preserve her colonial empire; some spoke in language similar to that of JFK.53 For that matter, even Truman and Acheson themselves agreed on the need for French reforms “toward the natives” and on the danger to American interests of seeming to support colonial control. So did Heath in Saigon, and so did Ambassador David Bruce in Paris. But all four parted company with the Kennedy line in their conviction that the French military effort nevertheless needed America’s full support. Cold War imperatives demanded it. Hence the tens of thousands of tons of U.S. military equipment that flowed in to Indochina—that is, to the French, not directly to the VNA—as 1951 turned into 1952.

  VIII

  DE LATTRE SOUGHT TO PUT SOME OF THAT EQUIPMENT TO IMMEDIATE use upon his return to Saigon. He did not have much time left, he knew. He was dying. Doctors had operated on him in Paris in October and had told him his final stay in Vietnam would be brief. Visibly weakened upon landing in Saigon but encouraged by the banners of support along the road as he drove from the airport to the Residency (“Vive le Général de Lattre”), de Lattre sought to show both Paris—where lawmakers prepared to de
bate the Indochina budget for 1952–53—and Washington that France could regain the ascendancy in the field.

  Major military engagements had been few since Giap’s return to guerrilla warfare in the summer. Attacks on convoys continued, and there were frequent hit-and-run attacks and assassinations: Most notably, in late July, in a rare example of a suicide bombing, a Viet Minh youth had unloosed from his jacket a grenade that killed himself along with Brigadier General Charles Marie Chanson, the French commander for South Vietnam, and Thai Lap Thanh, a Vietnamese local governor, during a public reception in a town southwest of Saigon. For de Lattre, it was another bitter blow. He considered Chanson—who had earned plaudits for his work in Tonkin in 1946–47 and more recently for getting the better of his Viet Minh counterpart in the south, Nguyen Binh—one of his ablest generals and had watched over and pushed his career for many years.54

  In the Red River Delta in the north, tension remained high in the late summer and fall, as Giap used regional troops to harass the French to considerable effect. The French answer in the delta was to conduct continual sweeps, using both static battalions and groupes mobiles. When these units located a fortified Viet Minh village, its inhabitants were given notice to quit; if they refused to comply, air support was called in to raze the village, usually using napalm. These operations achieved considerable short-term tactical success, and—these being rice-producing areas—caused the DRV’s food situation to grow worse. But the old problem remained: The French, undermanned as always, could not long stay in the conquered areas; as soon as they departed, the Viet Minh flowed back in. There existed no civil service organization to stay on the scene to try to work with the peasants, few of whom were in any mood to cooperate with those who had attacked their village.55

  De Lattre determined that his forces had to take the offensive, to extend their line outward on ground the enemy would have to defend, accepting a pitched battle. He chose the area around Hoa Binh, in the mountains to the west of the delta. An important river and road junction, Hoa Binh was reached by the RC6 from Hanoi and by the Black River, so transport should not be a major problem for French units. Sparsely populated, the area was also likely to suffer few civilian casualties in the fighting. Most important of all, de Lattre reasoned, success at Hoa Binh would cut the main line of communication by which the Viet Minh had drawn rice supplies from the south and sent down Chinese military equipment from the north. An added bonus: Hoa Binh was the capital town of the Muong tribe, whose hostility to the Viet Minh and potential loyalty to the French cause de Lattre sought to cement.56

  At dawn on November 14, three French paratroop battalions descended on the town, encountering almost no resistance. Simultaneously, some twenty-two infantry and artillery battalions and two armored groups, along with engineering forces to repair sabotaged roads and bridges, began moving up the narrow Black River valley. By the afternoon of the fifteenth, the French had achieved their objectives with virtually no losses and almost no enemy opposition. Giap, sensing he had neither numerical superiority nor an adequate route of withdrawal, had refused battle, pulling his troops back into the forested hills, content to fight another day on his own terms. In December, he was ready. He ordered his 304th, 308th, and 312th Divisions to close in on Hoa Binh and the RC6, while back in the delta he had elements of the 316th and 320th infiltrate from the north and south to harass French rear areas. Although unsuccessful in taking Hoa Binh, the Viet Minh were able to cut first the water and then the land routes into the town. French attempts to reopen communications exacted heavy cost in lives and equipment, and meanwhile the security situation in the delta deteriorated. “We shall never give up Hoa Binh,” de Lattre vowed, but he was wrong. In February 1952, General Raoul Salan ordered the post’s evacuation.57 The Viet Minh duly took it and began to push a north-south trail toward central and southern Vietnam, the beginning of what would become the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  The decision was Salan’s because by then de Lattre had died. On November 19, 1951, he had left Vietnam, ostensibly for a high-level Paris meeting. On the eve of his departure, there had been a cocktail party in his honor, attended by, among others, Graham Greene, the novelist, who spent the first of several consecutive winters in Saigon in 1951–52. Greene had visited Vietnam briefly early in the year and had been impressed then by de Lattre’s fierce dynamism. Now, the novelist observed, “the changes were startling.” De Lattre was an altered man, weary and morose, “his rhetoric of hope wearing painfully thin.” Even some of his subordinates criticized him, Greene went on, tired as they were of his constant references to his own loss—“others had sacrificed their sons too, and had not been able to fly the bodies home for a Paris funeral.”58

  At the meeting in Paris, de Lattre was lucid and forceful but so weak physically that afterward he had to be carried in a chair up to his apartment. His real reason for coming to France was medical, and on December 18, he underwent major surgery. An additional operation followed on January 5. His condition worsened until his death, confirmation crucifix clutched in his hand, on January 11. In the final days, he confided to General Valluy: “There is only one thing that upsets me: I have never completely understood Indochina.” His last words, voiced during a moment of brief consciousness on the ninth, were “Where is Bernard?”59

  So came to an end l’année de Lattre. His year had shown both the power and the limits of individual human agency in issues of war and peace. De Lattre indisputably demonstrated what a decisive contribution to events a leader can make, for without him the war in Tonkin might well have been lost in the early weeks of the year. The Viet Minh might have realized their propaganda claim “Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi by Tet.” Critics could reasonably respond that he would have been wiser to concede the north and center and focus instead on strengthening Cochin China, and it’s certainly the case that de Lattre faced deep structural problems in his vow to preserve all of Indochina within the French Union. He himself was aware of these problems, not least the lack of broad popular support for the Bao Dai regime and the unwillingness of anti-Communist Vietnamese to fight for the cause. More than his predecessors, he worked to build up the VNA and more broadly to mobilize the population in French-held areas to actively back the war effort.

  At the same time, de Lattre’s dictatorial methods alienated many Vietnamese, who also found his definition of Vietnamese independence far too restrictive. In one breath, he would say he fully supported Vietnamese nationalist aspirations; in the next, he would demand full popular loyalty to the French Union and to himself as France’s representative. He had no patience for the political navigating that independence must involve or for the nationalist who appeared insufficiently grateful. In this way de Lattre, for all his military sagacity and dazzling leadership, for all his daring and élan, was cut from the same cloth as the high commissioners who went before. His parting comment surely is telling: Never did he fully comprehend Indochina.

  His determination to keep Indochina within the French Union led him to expend great effort on a second objective: to boost the U.S. military involvement in the war. Here his legacy was of profound importance. De Lattre recognized immediately that only the Americans could supply the material assistance he needed, and over the course of the year he (along with his civilian counterparts in Paris) achieved great success in cementing America’s presence. Franco-American tensions remained considerable, but Harry Truman and his top aides bought the general’s argument that Korea and Indochina were the same struggle. Of de Lattre’s fifty-five weeks as commander in chief, none were more important than the two he spent in the United States. By January 1952 he was gone, but the Americans were more firmly committed to his cause than ever before.

  His passing cast a pall over the whole of France. Public mourning was decreed for three days, and for two days the body lay in state in the Invalides while a vast and reverent crowd filed silently past the bier. On January 15, the casket was placed on a tank beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and that evening mounted troops carrying t
orches escorted it to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, where the president of the republic bestowed upon de Lattre the title of Marshal of France. He was the first in almost three decades to be so honored. The following morning the archbishop of Paris led a solemn mass in the cathedral in the presence of the president, the government, the diplomatic corps, and the top military leadership, together with a large contingent of the general public.60

  For those who seek symbols, there were several. Charles de Gaulle, so crucial to the initial decision to reclaim Indochina for the empire after World War II, and (even though out of office by then) to wage war there, arrived alone and remained standing solitary for a long time before the coffin. General Eisenhower, soon to begin his campaign for president of the United States, and destined to face his own momentous decisions concerning war and peace in Vietnam, was one of the pallbearers as the casket was conveyed on a gun carriage from the cathedral through the silent crowded streets back to the Place des Invalides. And there was, finally, this: On January 17, the funeral cortège proceeded slowly from Paris to Versailles, Chartres, and Saumur, and on to Mouilleron-en-Pareds, where the coffin was placed in a grave next to that of Bernard, the only son, in the shade of two trees. A nearby windmill was made into a memorial chapel to perpetuate the memory of the father and son who, the citation said, gave their all for France.